Happy New Year

Happy New Year to you and yours!

We welcomed the New Year at our home enjoying turkey and a lovely French champagne given to us as a gift from Michael Elkins and Sean Strache (Keen Information Management (KeenIM) and good friends of Jenn). 

It was a lovely way to start our year off - Thank you Michael and Sean for helping us start our year-off in style!

Travel Visa Requirements

Embarking on our world tour in the near future brought up the question of visa requirements for the different places we may be traveling to.  Matt found a great reference via Wikipedia that may be helpful if you decide to embark on your own journey. 

One location noted "Immigration offenses, such as visa overstaying, are punishable by caning."  Yowsa!  You can believe we will be following the rules in this country.

Update on Wednesday, February 19, 2014 at 6:20AM by DINKS Travel

Please note - The Philippines requires a return ticket to the United States or to another country (as we luckily read online before we arrived).  We created an updated entry in Wikipedia for this.

Update on Saturday, February 22, 2014 at 6:43PM by DINKS Travel

We believe we found even a better site for Visa requirements while having to do more digging on what's necessary to keep us from being slowed down during our travels.  Try - http://www.visahq.com/.

Packing Preparations - The First Pass

We have read many long-term travel books and blogs and noticed that each recommends packing light.  Following is one approach we found particularly interesting:

1. Lay out everything you'd like to take with you.
2. Remove half of the items.
3. Remove another half of the remaining items - Performing all three steps should leave you with what you actually need.

To put this process to the test we have fulfilled step 1 by laying out everything we would like to take.  The above image shows that we have quite a bit of streamlining yet to do to move through step 2.

We will let you know how the process progresses as we continue to pare down our packables.

WHERE WOULD YOU GO?

Today, Matt's high school French teacher (Hello Mme Brubaker!) asked for more information about our plans.  Since a picture is worth a thousand words, we will keep this post brief and let the above graphic do the talking.

We have not created a set agenda for our adventures.  Our approach is to remain flexible and avoid over-planning in an attempt to retain a reasonable level of spontaneity.  Have you ever wanted to go to a train station or airport and choose an unfamiliar destination from the departures board?  We hope to do that on this trip.

Now that you have an idea of the general geographic regions we intend to visit, please comment and let us know if there are "must see" sites, cities or experiences that we should pencil into our informal itinerary!

Less than 2 Weeks!

Happy Holidays everyone!  Tis the season to celebrate with friends and family and we have been partying it up!  We would like to give a “shout out” to our friends and co-workers for awesome parties / outings, thoughtful gifts and well wishes.

Preparations are coming together.  It’s been a lot of work, but satisfying to know we will soon realize our goal.  Since our previous blog posting, we sold our secondary vehicle and condo, moved, finished all travel vaccinations, secured our international drivers’ licenses, and completed all travel related purchases.

And you may have noticed this website is officially up and running!  Woohoo!